Your Personal Data Online in Acxiom Is For Sale

In the little town of Conway, Arkansas, there is Acxiom. One could subtitle it: Big Brother is Watching. It's a big, nice building that happens to have 23,000 computer servers busy collecting and analyzing consumer data. Its business is database marketing, or, selling your data to other companies.

What data? The information it collects on just about every adult is your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, your health concerns, vacation preferences, hobbies and more. There 500 million consumers worldwide, each person has 1500 specific data points in its database. The company processes 50 trillion data transactions a year. The data they gather on you comes from numerous online social media and database sales, public records, consumer surveys. All legal and all for sale to customers like, Wells Fargo, Ford, Toyota, B of A, Macy's. Profits are great, the company earned $77 million last year.

Our personal information is being mined, collated and refined and then sold to the highest bidder. The company is one of the real veteran DB firms, it has been collecting personal data for 40 years. It has complete family profiles of 126 million U.S. families and works with 47 of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies.

Companies buy your personal data likes and dislikes, health issues, financial data to create ads or sales promos both in media and Internet. Once they have a group with similar data elements, they can target that group with special sales, products etc.

Still, scary stuff, if you ask me. What else do they know? Sexual preference? You habits?